Product (or service) configuration involves customizing a product with various options to satisfy needs of a particular customer. Providers of products display various features of their products to customers to assist the customers in feature and option selection for the products. Product configuration is an important function for websites by which a customizable product can be ordered.
Product configuration for simple products is an easy task, because simple products are provided with few customizable options. For example, a simple product can be a knife, where, for each model of a knife, there can be a few options from which to select to customize the knife. On the other hand, there are complex products, such motor vehicles, which can be customized using hundreds of options. For example, for each model of a motor vehicle, there are many options from which to select to customize the vehicle.
A provider of products, e.g., a vehicle seller can present all of the options, e.g., of the vehicle, on, for example, a single webpage. Thus, the customer will be presented with hundreds of options at once, which can be overwhelming and distracting to the customer. Moreover, some of the options presuppose other prerequisite options and some options can be incompatible with other options. For example, it can be the case that a red bumper can be offered only for a red vehicle while a yellow bumper can be offered only for a yellow vehicle. As a result, when a customer selects the exterior color of the vehicle, the color of the bumper should be preselected. As another example, ski racks on the roof may not be compatible with a sunroof, and thus, the customer should have to select one or the other, but presenting all of the options on a single page does not adequately address such interdependencies.